As someone who writes a lot about VPNs and online privacy, it’s not often that I have something nice to say about the huge tech corporations of the world. However, ol’ Google actually did something to help give people a little more privacy on the internet this time.
The new feature, the results about you page, essentially allows people to locate instances where identifiable data about them is publicly available online so that they can have it removed. Considering that stalkers and other predators can and will use the internet to accumulate as much information about those they’ve fixated on as they can, this will genuinely help to make the internet a slightly safer place. Praise where praise is due, that was a good one, Goog.
It’s also kind of ironic, though, that it’s Google doing this. It’s kind of like Robin Hood, if Robin was a much richer and more powerful figure than the Sheriff of Nottingham. Google is helping to take sensitive data out of the hands of malicious individuals and giving people back some element of privacy, but it also has an enormous wealth of data on every single one of us.
What have you searched on Google over the years? Which sites do you visit? Google knows, and it’s storing all of that information so that it can be sure to send you adverts that it’s determined (based on everything it’s extracted from you) that you’re most likely to be persuaded by and to click through on. It may not sell your data directly, but it does everything it can to make money from all the information it has about you.
That’s why I still recommend using one of the best VPN services (like NordVPN, Proton VPN, Surfshark, CyberGhost, or ExpressVPN). Though Google still tracks everything you do while a VPN is on, the information is only attributed to the IP address of the VPN server, and so as a consequence, Google can’t identify the habits of any individual user – it’s just one big amorphous mass of data from loads of people.
Of course, logging into Google would immediately undermine that – VPNs aren’t magic data shields, after all. Though in a world where you can search for information about a private medical condition and then get served ads for its treatments on social media, I’d rather have a VPN than not.
But, anyway, at least that creep you wanted to avoid won’t be able to find out more about you with a few Google searches anymore. It’s important to acknowledge the bigger picture, but the results about your page is definitely a good thing.
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